Security team tickets: 200/month → 20/month. Security incidents: same → 0. How?
The answer is counterintuitive. The best security teams aren't the ones you see everywhere. They're the ones that disappear into the workflow.
Container escape achieved. Attacker privilege: still none. Why?
The breach happened. The forensics confirmed it. Shellcode executed inside the container. Root user, full system access, network connectivity. All compromised. Everything the attacker needed to pivot was there.
None of it worked.
The escaped container had no network access to other services. Secrets were never mounted into the pod. The attacker had no credential to steal. The host firewall blocked outbound connections. The network policy denied access to the control plane. The RBAC denied any service account permissions.
The container was compromised. The architecture was not.
This is what defense in depth looks like when it actually works.
CVE-2024-CRITICAL. Score 9.8. The security team sends the alert. All-hands emergency meeting scheduled.
Our response: scheduled for next sprint.
Why? Because CVSS 9.8 doesn't mean anything until you know the actual risk.
Audit notice: 30 days. Evidence requested: everything.
Two weeks of scrambling. Teams pulling logs. Spreadsheets cross-checking commits. Patch requests hunting for proof that code reviews actually happened. Documentation written in panic mode. Governance questions without answers. A process that lived in people's heads, not in tooling.
Then one team showed their checklist. One list. One enforcement mechanism. Every claim tied to evidence collected automatically.
Audit was over in 2 weeks instead of 6.